Science Experiments: Density

Does anyone else have a tendency to think small for their children? Not that I don't want my children to do bigger, better and harder things, it's just that my brain thinks they're not old enough for things, subjects, etc... They're still little kids in my mind! lol

We've been working our way through the first module in Apologia General Science. I don't know why I thought dd would hate this or not comprehend. I need to think BIGGER for my children. She is loving it, and thriving. I thought I'd share a bit of step by step of the experiment we did yesterday, in picture form...

Density

The experiment calls for corn syrup, water and vegetable oil. Also a grape, a small rock, an ice cube and a piece of cork. We'll be learning about density and connectivity of atoms.

Pour oil in a glass, 1/4 full. Do the same with the water and then the corn syrup. You'll notice the corn syrup has atoms that are more tightly connected so it all sinks to the bottom, thereby passing through the atoms of the other substances. The water settles in the middle (atoms more tightly bound than oil, but less so than syrup) and oil at the top.

When we dropped the following items they did different things:

Grape - drops through oil and water and sits on surface of syrup.

Rock - drops through it all and lands on the bottom of syrup.

Ice Cube - floats in oil and/or settles on top of water but not in it.

Cork - floats on top of oil.

Daughter also wanted to see what a lava rock and a strawberry would do (lava rock hung out with the grape in the water on top of the corn syrup while the strawberry was only as dense as the oil. Go figure. I thought it would be like the grape!)

We learned which items have more density (corn syrup and rock) and which have less (oil and cork.)

I'll be sharing more experiments as we do them.  (For more tutorials, click on the page link at the top.)

*This homeschool post is linked to the Homeschool Mother's Journal.*